The teacher of history’s work should be, ideally, not simply a description of past cultures, but a performance of the culture in which we live and are increasingly taking our being.
History
The man who first gave history a recognized place in science was an ancient historian.
It was also Hegel who established the view that the different philosophic systems that we find in history are to be comprehended in terms of development and that they are generally one-sided because they owe their origins to a reaction against what has gone before.
Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral. Its transmission today is still in part oral, because we become acquainted with poetry through nursery rhymes, which we hear before we can read.
The great mass of women throughout history have been confined to the cultural level of animal life in providing the male with sexual outlet and exercising the animal functions of reproduction and care of the young.
In the course of her education she had gone through the history usually put into the hands of young people… now her ripened reason gave to her present study at least the advantage of novelty.
I didn’t learn much about writing at Sarah Lawrence, but I learned a lot about the sources of poems – dreams, myth, history – from the really great teachers, Joseph Campbell, Charles Trinkhaus, Bert Loewenberg, and a young Australian anthropologist named Harry Hawthorne.
History shows that all protest movements rely on symbols – boycotts, strikes, sit-ins, flags, songs. Symbolic action on whatever scale – from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to wearing a simple wristband – is designed to disrupt our everyday complacency and force people to think.
Haiti and the Dominican Republic don’t just share an island, Hispaniola, but a history, one that includes all the signal events that went into creating the modern world: Columbus, conquest, genocide, slavery, imperial war, revolution, and U.S. counterinsurgencies and military occupations.
One of the things that really bothers me is that Americans don’t have any sense of history. The majority of Americans don’t have any idea of where we’ve come from, so they naturally succumb to the kind of cliche version that Ronald Reagan represented.